Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/419

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HE history of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science is in reality the history of the development of science in Prussia, one may say throughout the territory covered by the present German empire. Founded July 11, 1700, by the Elector Frederick III. of Brandenburg at the solicitation of his wife Sophie Charlotte and of Leibniz, it not only gave an impulse to scientific research and scholarly investigation 1:1 every department of learning in Berlin and throughout Prussia, but became the model after which other societies with similar aims in the German-speaking world were brought into existence. Not quite as old as the French Academy nor as the Royal Society of Great Britain, nor as the Lincei in Rome, it has done as good work as any of them and exerted quite as wide an influence.

The period embraced in its life covers the period of the reconstruction of the German university and its growth from the unsatisfactory institution of the first quarter of the eighteenth century to its present commanding position in the world of learning. It covers the period in which the gymnasia were remodeled and the foundations laid of that system of common schools (Volksschule) for which Germany is now famous. It covers also the period of French oppression, of the re-awakening of the national spirit and of the contests which secured political freedom and a united German empire.

In 1694 the Elector Frederick founded the University of Halle, not long after, the Medical Society of Berlin and, in 1696, the Academy of Arts. He assumed the rank of king on January 18, 1701. He inherited a love of poetry and of learning from his father, the Great Elector, who refounded the universities of Königsberg and Frankfurt and brought the University of Duisberg into existence. He had planned also a universal university at Brandenburg to be free to